So What Exactly Do You Do?

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Happy Thursday to you! I hope that it has been a good one for you, or will be, depending on where you are in the world. Today I want to try and answer a question which I was asked a lot during my time home. “So what is it that you do, exactly?” I usually come up with a long list of duties ranging from tutoring, to cleaning, to cooking, among other things. Let me try and give you a better picture. This morning I went grocery shopping with Chris and Timmy. This is a normal Thursday ritual, so after the guys left for school, we took a little time to make ourselves presentable and again went to Kandern (about 9 kilometers down some windy switch-back roads) which not only holds the main BFA campus but also is home to the three grocery stores which we frequent. At our first stop, Pennymarkt, which is about as big as a large convenience store, I grabbed a cart and began to fill it. 20 bananas, 2 bags of about 10 apples each, 20 eggs (we didn’t need much today), 24 cups of yogurt, 6 packages of sliced cheese for lunch, about 10 packages of deli meat, 3 loaves of bread, among other things. All in all, we filled 2 average shopping carts. To find cheddar cheese for our weekend cooking, we head to another local grocery store. We us an average of 7-8 liters of milk a day, so for that we visit yet another grocery store. While these numbers may not sound impressive at first, the clincher is that all of this will last til Monday, when our dorm parents go shopping again. What makes all of this difficult for me is the language barrier. While I am gradually picking up vocabulary, it has been a rather steep upward climb for me.  Here are a few words I have learned that have helped me in my grocery shopping:

Gurken – Cucumber

Zwiebel – onion
Knochblauch – garlic

Tomaten – tomatoes (easy one!)

Salat – lettuce

Eier – egg

Käse – cheese

Schinken – ham

Puten – Turkey

Hähnchen – chicken

While these words may seem simple, it is amazing how much easier shopping can be when you know them!! 
I’ve got a pretty good handle on my numbers as well.

These days around the dorm have been pretty exciting. We have had home basketball games for the past two weekends, and will have them this weekend as well. Our wrestling team also travels just about every weekend. We have six Sonneknights on the wrestling team and it is exciting to hear how they are improving. One of my seniors, Josh, is the team captain, and I am extremely proud of him. These days are eventful for the seniors as well. Most of them have heard or are hearing back from different schools and universities, and are now working through the details of financial aid, logistics, moving to the US, and all of the other facets of a transition out of high school to university. Please keep these guys in your prayers as they make decisions. Pray that they would diligently seek what God has for them, and that they would also stay healthy. We have several strains of the flu virus as well as various versions of the common cold floating around the school. Several guys have come home from school early this week, but with a little bit of sleep and some medicine they've been up and running again before too long. Please pray that no one else will get it, and that we will all get the rest we need. God is so good, and I am so thankful to be here. He is teaching me so much and I look forward to sharing more of that with you very soon. Have a wonderful week!

Blessings,
Lauren 

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